Above: before; below after (almost) from:
At this point you
may be wondering, “Why is this Connecticut boy (as if some silver haired
grandpa could use the word “boy” to describe himself) going on and on about
California on a blog that was really started with field observations about a
site in his Connecticut neighborhood?”
Alyssa Alexandria photo
I guess it’s just
because of the familiar feeling I get looking at photos of what’s described as “settler’s
rock walls” and the broader landscape that they occur on – much different from
Connecticut as locales but familiar in construction. I think I see what could
be effigies and patterns in the artistic stacking of stones, linking outcrops
and boulders – boulders that could be effigies and “stone baskets.” I think I
see how some of these “rock walls” could be fuel breaks around different resource
zones, just as I see them around here, maybe game drives and yet some are so perplexing,
sometimes spirals and other non-rectangular shapes that make you think of them
as Ceremonial, which really means you can’t think of anything else to call that
shape or guess a function.
Alyssa Alexandria photo
And I guess that
it’s a “California Re-Charge” that I’m experiencing after a week-long visit, a couple
drives out of the suburban and urban congestion of LA, passing through the
Laguna Canyon and driving up above Irvine and seeing some signs of the older
Cultural Landscape, finding they are places that First People are saying are
Sacred Sites and are actively fighting to preserve.
…..Or sacrifice one to save four others.
I really do enjoy
diving into the literature, surprising myself with what I find about “donation
piles,” described almost word for word as the ones in this corner of Turtle
Island. I like being surprised about named boulders, seeing a one hundred year
old photo of one of them that has stones placed on top of her that were there
for as long as the oldest living elder could remember, although they could be
knocked off “with the sweep of a hand.”
I like to read about the burning off of the land, since I
read about it so often in those old local histories from all those towns around
mine (and beyond).
It’s no surprise that I liked the surprises I came across
yesterday and in the early hours of this morning, thinking I could easily
substitute the name “Connecticut” for the word “California” in this fourth
chapter of “Tending the Wild.” There was a great bonus to this work that couldn’t
happen here – First People remember the landscape being burned over and are
actively working to be allowed to do so again, to be able to “take care” the
plants and animals, to be able to “renew the world.” Take a look:
“Indigenous peoples have been pigeonholed
by social scientists into one of two categories, “hunter-gatherer” or
“agriculturist,” obscuring the ancient role of many indigenous peoples as
wildland managers and limiting their use of and impacts on nature to the two
extremes of human intervention. The image evoked by the term hunter-gatherer
is of a wanderer or nomad, plucking berries and pinching greens and living
a hand-to-mouth existence; agriculturist, at the other extreme, refers
to one who completely transforms wildland environments, saves and sows seed,
and clears engulfing vegetation by means of fire and hand weeding. This
dichotomous view of nature–human interactions has shut out the fact that Indian
groups across California practiced many diverse approaches to land use, and it
has led to a focus on domestication as the only way humans can influence plants
and animals and shape natural environments.
Recently anthropologists have learned
about the complexity of traditional ecological knowledge and the extent of
indigenous peoples’ management of wildlands by going to other parts of the
world to study more intact cultures (e.g., Darrell Posey’s work with the Kayapó
Indians in the Brazilian Amazon and Henry Lewis’s fire management work with
Australian Aborigines).But a reassessment of the record in California reveals
that land management systems have been in place here for at least twelve
thousand years—ample time to affect the evolutionary course of plant species
and plant communities.
These systems extend beyond the
manipulation of plant populations for food. Traditional management systems have
influenced the size, extent, pattern, structure, and composition of the flora
and fauna within a multitude of vegetation types throughout the state. When the
first Europeans visited California, therefore, they did not find in many places
a pristine, virtually uninhabited wilderness but rather a carefully tended
“garden” that was the result of thousands of years of selective harvesting,
tilling, burning, pruning, sowing, weeding, and transplanting.
Much of the rich material disclosing the ancient
management of wilderness lies in the dusty diaries and handwritten notes of
anthropologists and the eyewitness accounts of early European settlers. For
example, Kroeber’s 1939 field notes, housed at the Bancroft Library at the
University of California, Berkeley, record that the Yurok of northwestern
California practiced burning at a frequency that was appropriate for each
cultural purpose: burning of hazelnut for basketry occurred every two years;
burning under the tan oaks to keep the brush down took place every three years;
burning for elk feed occurred every fourth or fifth year; burning in the
redwoods for brush and downed fuel control occurred every three to five years.
These observations did not change his thinking about “hunter-gatherers,” nor
did he publish them. Other early anthropologists found examples of hunter-gatherers
saving and sowing wild seeds, pruning wild crops, and managing wildlife and
vegetation with fire (page 125)”
“… Burning is the application of
fire to particular vegetation areas under specified conditions to achieve
select cultural purposes. The use of fire entails a number of important
considerations, such as seasonality, the frequency of burning in a particular
area, and the aerial extent of the fire… It has been shown that pruning or
burning vegetation increases the forage value for certain wildlife and that the
number of larger game animals increases after fire…”
Courtney Martin
“Today elders from a number of tribes
substantiate that the practice of burning is highly beneficial to wildlife. The
Sierra Miwok elder Bill Franklin learned about burning from his father and
grandfather: “They said the Indians used
to burn in the fall—October and November. They set the fires from the bottom of
the slope to decrease the snowpack, get rid of the debris so there’s no fire
danger and they burned in the hunting areas so there was more food for the
deer. They burned every year and in the same areas” (pers. comm. 1990).
Fire was also used in hunting
many kinds of animals. Often, burning carried out for the immediate purpose of
securing food had secondary ecological effects noted above. The methods used
for hunting were ingenious and numerous. Tribes employed fire to attract
animals, to drive them in certain directions, to create smoke for killing
rodents in their burrows, or, in the case of insects, to reveal their nests or
disable or kill them so that they could be collected. Alfred Kroeber recorded
among the Yokuts: “When the geese traveled,
inflammable brush was piled up, and when the birds were heard approaching on
dark, still nights these were suddenly lit. The birds swooped down to the
flare, and in their bewilderment were easily killed.”
The Owens Valley Paiute stalked deer in
disguise, used a surround with people and trained dogs, and sometimes fired
brush. The Sierra Miwok set small fires in the hills around a meadow, into
which deer went. These men then kept building new fires. As the deer descended
to the meadow, they approached the fires out of curiosity and concealed hunters
shot them with bows and arrows. A Hupa man described how fire was used to
capture deer: “Two fires set in canyon so
as to burn toward bottom. Some hunters drove with the fire; others awaited game
at bottom.” Fire was a tool used often for driving rabbits. For example,
brush was fired for driving rabbits on the floor of valleys by the Tubatulabal
between July and the middle of August. Twenty or more men stood in a circle
outside of the burning brush and as the rabbits fled, the men shot them with
bows and arrows. The historian Thomas Fletcher said, “In late summer and early fall the Kuzedika [Mono Lake Paiute] held
rabbit drives around the lake flats. The drives required the participation of
many people, some to hold the long nets into which the rabbits were driven,
others to light fires in the sagebrush and force the rabbits into the nets.”
Above Ron Smith photo; below "Game Drive Turtle Vision"
Colonel Rice described game
hunting in the forests by the Cosumnes Indians (Plains Miwok) in 1850: “A whole settlement would turn out and begin
operations by starting a number of small fires at regular intervals in a circle
through the woods, guiding the flame by raking up the pine needles, and
stamping out the fire when it spread too far. When the fires burned out there
was left a narrow strip of bare ground enclosing a circular area of several acres,
within which the game was confined. A large fire was then kindled at a point
inside of the circle, taking advantage of the direction of the wind, and
allowed to spread unchecked. The men, armed with bows and arrows and
accompanied by their dogs, kept to the windward in front of the fire and shot
down the rabbits and other small animals as the heat drove them from cover,
while the women, with their conical baskets on their backs, followed up the
fire to gather up the grasshoppers, which merely had their wings singed by the
fire, but were not killed.”
Many elders in the Sierra Nevada
foothills recalled how their ancestors set fires to clear the brush. Several
examples are included below.
Mother and Grandmother used to talk about
burning the brush. The fires were set up around Cascadel [North Fork,
California] in the ponderosa pines. The fire would creep along because it was
late in the fall when the winds have stopped that they would set the fires.
They’d burn coming out of the forest, usually late fall before the storms
start, about September, October and November. The fires would just go out. It
wasn’t covered like it is now with pine needles, old limbs and stuff that is
all dry. Wherever the brush or trash was, they would set fires. But there
wasn’t the brush like there is now. Every year fires were set and they never
got hot enough to burn the big trees. In 1913 we could ride straight in the
saddle and not knock the brush out of the way. It was open country. Then they
came with their fire restrictions. (Nellie Lavell, North Fork Mono, pers.
comm. 1991)
I’m going by what the elders told me
happened in the 1800s. Burning was in the fall of the year when the plants were
all dried up when it was going to rain. They’d burn areas when they would see
it’s in need. If the brush was too high and too brushy it gets out of control.
If the shrubs got two to four feet in height it would be time to burn. They’d burn
every two years. Both men and women would set the fires. The flames wouldn’t
get very high. It wouldn’t burn the trees, only the shrubs. They burned around
the camping grounds where they lived and around where they gathered. They also
cleared pathways between camps. Burning brush helped to save water. They burned
in the valleys and foothills. I never heard of the Indians setting fires in the
higher mountains, but don’t take my word for it. (Rosalie Bethel,
North Fork Mono, pers. comm. 1989)
My parents talked about the old-time
Indians burning. All the elders talked about the Indians burning as they came
down the mountains in the fall to the lower elevations. It was common
knowledge. They’d burn in October or the last of September. The fires didn’t
burn out of control.
Nacomas
Turner said they let Yosemite National Park go to heck because they let the
trash stay on the ground for so many years.Walking in the forest is like
walking on foam rubber. The litter must have been a foot deep. Everything our
people did 50 years ago they don’t dare do today. My dad and mother used to
burn on their properties. (Sylvena Mayer, North Fork Mono, pers. comm. 1991)
Courtney Martin
Taking Care of Nature
We have learned that native
plants were tended with a variety of resource management techniques, including
pruning diseased parts of favored plants, weeding around plants to decrease
competition and aerate the soil, replanting the smaller bulblets of harvested
plants, and scattering seed. Many different habitats were burned to heighten
the amount of forage and its nutritional value for various species of wildlife.
Today California Indians often refer to these practices as “caring about” the
plant or animal. Traditionally, Indians did not consider their actions
management per se; “management” is a Western term implying control. Rather,
caring for plants and animals in the California Indian sense meant establishing
a deeply experiential and
reciprocal relationship with
them.
For millennia native people used
the vast diversity of California’s flora and fauna as sources of food,
medicine, basketry, weapons, tools, games, shelters, and ceremonial items.
Numerous plant and animal species were integral to every facet of Indian
culture—religious festivals and life events such as childbirth, puberty, and
death. Plants and animals were talked to, prayed for, and thanked with
offerings. When they gathered or hunted, Indians adhered to ancient rules and
techniques that allowed for resource use while keeping the resource base
intact. As a result, some traditional gathering and hunting sites are very,
very old.
By virtue of their daily use of
plants, California Indians acquired extensive and special knowledge of the life
histories of plant species, and they understood how different harvesting
strategies affected natural regeneration.
Their concern about replacement
and return means that their gathering may be called “judicious,” because the
act is conducted with calculated temperance and restraint. Many of the
gathering and management strategies are potentially sustainable, allowing for
repeat harvests. Potentially sustainable harvesting strategies included
harvesting plants for their tubers after seeding, cutting shrubs during the
dormant period, sparing individual plants for future regeneration, granting
plant populations rest periods, and using appropriate, nondestructive
technologies.
As horticulturists, California
Indians tilled the soil, pruned shrubs, sowed the seeds of wildflowers and
grasses, and, in some cases, set the fires that nourished their food and
basketry crops. These techniques had subtle yet important ecological impacts at
the species, population, community, and landscape levels within a multitude of
habitats in different parts of California.
In particular, the development of
fire as a vegetation management tool enabled women and men to systematically
alter the natural environment on a long-term basis and at a massive scale. What
becomes clear is that California Indians had a profound knowledge of the
plants, animals, and ecological processes around them. When historical
indigenous interactions—both harvesting strategies and resource management
practices—are investigated in depth, we find that by keeping ecosystems in a
modest or intermediate level of disturbance, in many senses Indians lived in ecological
harmony with nature.
From Tending the Wild; Native American Knowledge
and the Management of California’s Natural Resources Chapter Four “Methods of Caring for the Land” by M.
Kat Anderson
Originally accessed from the now dead link:
